Just as each new seed requires a period of gestation -- a time of deep silence and solitude -- so, too, we need such seasons. "Someone wrote me recently and asked if it wasn't frustrating to have exterior solitude interrupted. Well, you learn to live out of your interior solitude. And perhaps this is one of the keys to living in the madness, the telescoping demands and resulting exhaustion of our society: to explore our own interior solitude and learn not only to be afraid of it but to live out if its self-discipline, its limitless resources and deep silence. Solitude is like a tea ceremony, the celebration of life in all its homely movements taken out of time -- the wonder of the commonplace, the mystery of ordinary life ... Solitude is being poured-out-through. We evolve toward simplicity. We dwell in the Word."
Rebecca's baptism just moments before her death exemplified the existential bridge from private to universal suffering. That water, flesh and blood blessing fell like a stone into a still lake, sending out ripples of grace through Rebecca to everyone, and from everyone to her, from and to the heart of all creation in God...To love in the presence of death is to cultivate humus, the ground that brings new life. And the ground is God, ever new.